


a very soft epilogue (my love)

by darcylindbergh



Series: things fairy tales are made of [6]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Dancing, Explicit Sexual Content, Extremely Domestic Fluff, Fluff, Growing Old Together, Grumpy Old Men, M/M, Retirement, Sussex, They Also Have a Dog, They Live Forever
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-31
Updated: 2017-04-01
Packaged: 2018-10-13 01:52:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,409
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10503972
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/darcylindbergh/pseuds/darcylindbergh
Summary: Across the pillows, Sherlock shifts and hums, the creases of his face deepening and then smoothing before settling. John watches him wake up, his chest swelling with affection and fondness, and thinks he’ll never get tired of Sherlock in the mornings, sleepy and soft.It’s been some forty-odd years, and John hasn’t gotten tired of it yet.





	1. mornings

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [Очень нежный эпилог (любовь моя) (A very soft epilogue (my love))](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14549016) by [PulpFiction](https://archiveofourown.org/users/PulpFiction/pseuds/PulpFiction)


    
    
    "I think we deserve  
    
    a soft epilogue, my love.  
    
    We are good people  
    
    and we've suffered enough."  
    
    -[Seventy Years of Sleep #4, nikka ursula](http://cardiamachina.co.vu/post/126917973423/i-think-we-deserve-a-soft-epilogue-my-love)

*

John opens his eyes.

The morning slips gently around the bedroom, grey-blue-pink with sunrise and the last hangers-on of an overnight rain. It’s warm, and quiet, and John is snugged up with Sherlock under the covers, content to be still and watch the dawn roll in. 

Years ago, he might’ve said the comfort of moments like this was in the knowing that one belongs where one is; these days, he has belonged so long, he doesn’t even remember to consider the times when he didn’t.  

Across the pillows, Sherlock shifts and hums, the creases of his face deepening and then smoothing before settling. John watches him wake up, his chest swelling with affection and fondness, and thinks he’ll never get tired of Sherlock in the mornings, sleepy and soft.

It’s been some forty-odd years, and John hasn’t gotten tired of it yet.

“My god,” Sherlock drawls, low and gravelly, without opening his eyes. He rubs his head against the pillow, rubbing his wiry grey curls wild, scrunching his face up a moment. “Are you always this loud in the mornings?”

John smiles and hums back, exactly the way Sherlock had known he would. “Sorry,” he says, not sorry at all, “Can’t be helped. It’s a lovely morning, and I’m pleased as punch with it.”

“You’d be pleased as punch no matter what the morning were like,” Sherlock grouses, eyes still closed.

“Probably. As long as I were with you.”

Sherlock smiles into his pillowcase, half trying to hide it, even after all this time. John knows his cue when he sees it; he closes a hand around Sherlock’s wrist and tugs him over, tugging him into the worn, familiar places where their bodies fit together, soft paunches and weary muscles and fine bones sliding into place easily, naturally.

John thinks that anyone who looks at him should be able to see the places where Sherlock fits around him.

Sherlock rests his head on John’s shoulder, and he’s a warm, heavy weight that stills something in John’s soul that he hadn’t even realised wasn’t still. Sherlock smells like talcum powder and cherry pipe tobacco, and a bit like spring itself, where he’s spent so much time out-of-doors lately, and his skin feels thin under John’s hand, papery-delicate-smooth. John makes a mental note to wrap him up warm before he heads out to the hives today.

“I love you,” John says quietly.

There’s a _hmph_ against John’s chest, but he can feel Sherlock’s smile too. “You’re an incorrigible romantic, John Watson,” he murmurs.

“Don’t tell the neighbors. I have a reputation to keep up with. Horrible old Watson, the terror of the village.”

Sherlock shakes with suppressed laughter. “They think you’re adorable.”

“Shut up, you great prune.”

“I love you too.”

*

Eventually they heave themselves out of bed and into their slippers. Sherlock goes out with the dog—“Put on a proper coat, too, don’t go out there in just your dressing gown, for god’s sakes”—while John puts on the kettle and starts some toast. He watches Sherlock from the window, traipsing around the garden in John’s flannel jacket with his dressing gown fluttering out from underneath it, his pyjama bottoms shoved into a pair of green wellies so they don’t get wet in the morning dew. The dog is a shiny red blur bounding around him, and John doesn’t have to be out there with them to hear Sherlock’s delighted bark of laughter.

The toast pops, and John shuffles the slices onto a plate, sets the table up with cream for their tea and orange-rose marmalade from the stand down the road, and shakes open yesterday’s newspaper. World’s gone mad, it seems, but Sussex still stands, unconcerned with it all, so who cares.

Sherlock comes back in, pink-cheeked and bright-eyed, with a chunk of honeycomb in a little porcelain dish he must’ve nicked from the kitchen on his way through. The dog follows, licking John’s hand once or twice before going to investigate her food bowl.

“Fresh,” Sherlock says, indicating the honeycomb as he sets it in the middle of the table. “It’s going to be a good year for it, now that the lavender’s coming up in the east pasture.”

“Fiddling in those hives without your gear on will make it a short year,” John harrumphs, but still tilts his head up for Sherlock’s honey-sweet kiss. “How were the bees?”

“Drowsy,” Sherlock shrugs. He nods at the paper in John’s hand. “How is the world?”

“Full of tossers, per usual.”

“Any of them have the decency to die in an interesting way?”

“Not yet, but the day is young.”

Sherlock hums, and brings a knife and a leftover chunk of gruyere and the rest of the bread with him to the table when he sits down. He pries off pieces of cheese and honeycomb in turn, eating some with little torn-off hunks of bread and some just off his fingers, and a fair few end up in John’s mouth as well, and it tastes like sunlight and the way Sherlock’s wrinkles deepen when he chuckles, well-worn and well-loved.

*

“ _Hounds_ is still in the top ten,” Sherlock notes, stealing a bit of newspaper out from under John’s hand and looking over the bestsellers lists as he pops a bit of honeycomb into his mouth. “Sixth week?”

“Tenth, and you know it.” _The Hound of Baskerville_ had first been published nearly twenty-five years ago, but the re-print, with Sherlock’s new additions inserted in between John’s original chapters, was enjoying a nice little resurgence. The re-prints of John’s old books were doing them quite a bit of good now that they were getting on in years.

 _The Reichenbach Falls_ , however, was not getting a re-print, much to John’s publisher’s dismay. John didn’t care—once was enough, and he and Sherlock had agreed, when they started the whole business of new editions, that some things deserved to be left in the past. It was just a blip on some faraway horizon of a life well-lived, they had thought, and besides, the Official Secrets Act would’ve blacked out the interesting bits anyway.  

“I like that one,” Sherlock says. “We should go back there. Grimpen Village. See the minefields again.”

John leans back in his chair and squints deviously at him from behind his glasses. “Get us a double this time, should we?”

“I almost got into bed with you that night, you know." 

John does know this, of course. They’ve talked about it all before, but he knows the game of the conversation, and he follows Sherlock’s lead. “I don’t know that I’d have let you.”

“Yes, you would have.”

“All right, I would have. I wouldn’t have fucked you, though.”

“Mm. Yes, you would have.”

“Well, maybe.”

“John.”

“No—I think I’m right about this. I mean, I could’ve done it right, maybe, okay. I might’ve done. Properly, you know, all. Gently. Whatever. But I wouldn’t have fucked you.”

Sherlock hums as he considers it. “We should go back. You can make love to me the first night, and fuck me the second.”

“Two nights in a row?” John takes a sceptical sip of tea. “Ambitious.”

Sherlock rolls up the page and swats him in the arm with it. John laughs, and retaliates by smearing a bit of honey on the tip of Sherlock’s nose, and then kisses the giggle out of his mouth.

*

The hours pass, and they neither really notice nor care. The cheese and bread lay out on the table too long, and there are too many cups of tea, which John gripes about but doesn’t stop Sherlock from making, as though protesting that there’s too much caffeine will stop the effects of it on them.  

John finishes the paper and starts a medical journal, and badgers Sherlock into taking his vitamins and medications before pulling out all the bottles and packets and working on divvying out the next week’s dosages into a pill case organized by day—Sherlock’s, the blue case, and John’s, the red. The dog sleeps under the table for an hour or two, her head balanced carefully on the top of one of John’s feet until his toes fall asleep and he has to nudge her away.

Sherlock, for his part, brings in a handful or two of flowers from the garden and spends an hour or two dismantling them to study their anatomy, making little drawings with fine, spidery labels in a leather-bound notebook and spreading flower petals over the table. John has to brush a few leaves out of the way to take another bit of the cheese, and doesn’t think to mind.

He doesn’t think about how they might be different from the way they used to be, or how they might still be the same. They simply are, and have been, and will be, and Sherlock puts the leftover flowers in a glass jar filled with water and kisses John’s cheek between discoveries, and it seems to John like it has always been this way.

And the morning eases away into the afternoon.

 


	2. afternoons

The thing about stories, John thinks, is this: sometimes you have to be midway through the telling before you can really understand why it needed to be told, and what parts of it, and how they should all flow together.

Beginnings, generally, are easy, because a story begins when something happens: an introduction, an uncovered mystery, an unexpected hello. A birth. A death. A renewal, sometimes. Sometimes, a goodbye.  

Sometimes, just sometimes, a question waiting in a doorway, waiting in the rain, asking for a second chance.

So things begin.

Middles, however, are different. Middles are harder to tell, because there is always more happening in any given story than what’s being told, and each detail is a possibility: diverging branches, leading to endless universes, where maybe Sherlock didn’t come home that night, so many nights ago, when the flat was less a home than an empty holding place. Where maybe John didn’t come home after him. Where the rings on their left hands weren’t identical, or there at all.

It’s hard to get the middles right, John thinks. Sometimes you don’t know whether you really have until you’ve got to the end.

*

Around half-one, John gets in the bath. It’s a bit of an indulgence, this: sinking in, with all his creaking, popping joints, and letting himself relax for a while. There’s a candle lit on the window sill, filling the room with the smell of clean cotton, and his mobile is on a stool pulled up close to the tub so that he can phone Sherlock for help when he’s ready to get out. It’s a deep tub, after all, and the hip replacement three years ago had done well enough but it wasn’t a bloody robotic joint.

He’s just closed his eyes and wandered somewhere like a dream when he hears the bathroom door open, and John smiles at the sound of Sherlock coming in and closing the door behind him, to keep the dog out. He’d told John about half an hour ago that he was going out to muck around the garden this afternoon, which generally meant wandering about, pulling weeds at random, and making plans too big for his octogenarian britches, but it had rained last night, so John isn’t surprised that it hadn’t lasted.

“No sleeping in the tub,” Sherlock says as he settles in, closing the toilet lid and taking a seat on it.

“Not sleeping,” John answers, even though he had almost been. “You’re in early. Come to keep me company?”

“Must be a rain coming, getting that bit of ache. And yes. I like your company.” He twists his hands together, cracks arthritic fingers. John winces.

“Knock that off, you’ll make it worse.”

Sherlock only grins that Cheshire grin and does it again, before launching into a theory he must have been thinking about all morning, about the orange-rose marmalade they’d had for breakfast. He thought it no more than some mass-produced brand, ordered in bulk from Amazon, with the original stickers scratched off and a _Local!_ sticker put on instead.

John laughs, and asks questions about the shape of the jars and the print on the lids, and Sherlock plunges along the web of a local marmalade conspiracy as easily and as animatedly as he does about a homicide. “Fantastic,” John tells him earnestly, when Sherlock is breathless and triumphant, confident in his conclusion that the jam stand is ripping the village off. “You’re brilliant.”

Sherlock’s grin widens, and John feels a familiar push of _yes, god yes_ ripple down his spine. Once, an afternoon in the bath might’ve ended with Sherlock down on his knees next to the tub, slipping one long arm into the water, heedless of his shirtsleeve because he knew that drove John crazy in the best way. He might’ve sought out the secret, private places on John’s body, touched and stroked him to completion. He might’ve leaned in, kissed John hard, stolen the gasp from his mouth as he finished himself with one wet, soapy hand.

John shifts, and decides the bath is far too lukewarm at this point to be having thoughts like that. He raises one hand to beckon Sherlock over, but Sherlock is already there, waiting to take it. “Ready?” Sherlock asks, arranging his grip evenly on both John’s forearms to pull him up. “Steady now, two, three, up.”

John rises in a rush of water, and there’s a brief unsteady second as his balance flounders from having been sitting for too long, but then Sherlock helps him step onto the rug and it evens out. He stands there, dripping for a moment, before Sherlock wraps a towel around his shoulders. He uses one corner of it to pat the skin of John’s cheeks and neck dry, utterly tender, then reaches for a second towel and works on rubbing the rest of John down—both to help John’s circulation get moving again, and because he likes the gentleness of it, the reverence. He always has.

Once, Sherlock might’ve taken that towel and gotten to his knees, and shown John’s body a different kind of reverence. The memories of it make John shiver, and he wears that thought openly in his grin the next time Sherlock glances at his face.

“You’re randy,” Sherlock observes instantly, a wicked little smirk forming at the corner of his mouth.

“You’re beautiful,” John shrugs. “Hard not to be, with you around.”

Sherlock’s smirk slides into more of a genuinely pleased smile. “Randy enough to take you to bed, do you think?”

“I think so,” John agrees, and kisses him full on the mouth.  

*

“You’re lovely,” John breathes, reaching a hand to stroke over Sherlock’s cheek. They’re lying side by side, facing each other, naked but under the sheet so they don’t get cold. “The loveliest thing I ever did see.”

“John,” Sherlock says, and that’s all there is, really. That’s all Sherlock has ever needed to say for John to know what he means—he means everything, and always, and finally.

John leans in and kisses him, and then lays kisses down his cheek, down his neck, into the powdery softness of his skin. He kisses Sherlock’s shoulders, and his arms, and his wrists, his fingertips. Kissing Sherlock properly is something John takes a good lot of pride in, and he does it very well.  

Sherlock giggles, and jerks under John’s fingers when he hits upon a ticklish spot, and brings John back up so he can kiss John’s mouth. They’re slow and purposeful and certain, the both of them more familiar with the body pressed against them than with their own. They know how to touch each other, and they have known, so well and so long, that it comes almost without thinking.  

John knows how to make Sherlock laugh in the middle, and how to make him beg, when to pull him close and when to push him into the pillows. Which touches thrill and which magnify and which overwhelm. What to say and what to ask, and when, and how, whispered in Sherlock’s ear, whispered along his jaw, _come on, come on, yes, just there, can I? All right?_

And now, now that things are softer and less urgent than they were when John learned these things, John can finally focus on Sherlock the way he’s always desperate to: on the cadence of his breath, on the tremble of his belly, on the clutch of his fingers. On his touch. On his voice. On his love, _their_ love, their hands, cool and clasped together in the sheets.  

John has spent more than half his life loving Sherlock.

John has spent more than half his life loving Sherlock, and he has loved Sherlock with everything in him, has loved him fiercely and delicately and painfully and miraculously and more. John has spent more than half his years with these hands on his body and these eyes on his eyes, with the way Sherlock hangs on, the way Sherlock gives over, with the rhythm of his pulse and the call of John’s name in his mouth even when he isn’t speaking.

He has spent a lifetime he thought he’d never have loving Sherlock as best as he can. Someday he thinks it might finally be enough.

*

“All right?” John asks, when things are beginning to heat, when their skin is beginning to stick together with sweat and Sherlock is beginning to buck into the twist of his hand around the silky head of Sherlock’s cock.

Sherlock tips his head back against the pillow and heaves a breath, fumbling to catch John around the wrist. “You too,” he manages. “John. You too.”

“Yeah,” John says, “yeah, okay, careful now—just—” and kisses Sherlock through a moan. He helps him shift a little so he’s more on his back, so John can settle some of his weight over him and line himself up, cock-to-cock—still not quite all the way hard, but he knows from experience that he’ll get there, or maybe he won’t, but he’ll get off anyway, or maybe he won’t, but it’ll still feel damn nice, and anyway it’s not the first time his mind has caught on quicker than his body, but Christ, Sherlock is hard at any rate, hard and hot and gorgeous—and he wraps a hand around them both and thrusts against him.

“Oh,” Sherlock says, like it’s a revelation, so John does it again. “Oh, oh, oh.”

From there, it’s all salt, and friction, and wet slide of Sherlock’s mouth over John’s skin, the slick drag of their cocks in John’s hand, the slow rhythm of trying to get it right, trying to get the right spots at the right time in the right order to push them both under the cresting wave.

And John knows, and Sherlock knows too. They know enough. They know plenty.

Sherlock’s orgasm stutters through him first, all damp gasping breath and clenching fingers around John’s shoulders and the _oh_ on his face, creased and magnificent with more than half their lives lived in the lines. John swallows and shudders and thrusts again, once more, and then he comes, grinding his hips down into the cushion of Sherlock’s soft tummy until Sherlock grunts. John collapses, very carefully, to the side, holding Sherlock close with one hand on the nape of his neck while they both catch their breath.

After a moment, Sherlock chuckles against the curve of John’s jaw, and then sighs a smile into his skin.

It never feels like needing something, with Sherlock. It feels like having it.

*

“Do you remember,” Sherlock says quietly, minutes later or hours maybe, his voice too creaky with age to really whisper, “do you remember when we bought this house?”

John shifts, looking over his profile in the fading light of the afternoon. It had been something like twenty-seven or twenty-eight years ago, and _we_ seems like a generous term for how the house came to be, but yes. He remembers. “Mostly.”

The corner of Sherlock’s mouth tilts up. “Do you remember what I said, that first night?”

Sherlock had been young, then. John had been too. Their early fifties. Or maybe their late fifties. That was about the time the grey had started in Sherlock’s hair, streaking into his curls from his temples. John had teased him and thought he was unbearably sexy. They’d been living half in Sussex, half in London, back then, but John had been excited about the cottage, about the future he could see in it.

“You said, John, never let me put a pond in the garden, I’ll hate us both forever if you do.”

“Shush. I love that pond.”

“You hate the pond.”

“I hate taking care of it, that’s not the same. I’m being serious, though. Do you remember?”

John gives his hand a squeeze under the covers and remembers. “You said you hadn’t dared to dream about what the rest of your life might be like.” He raises Sherlock’s hand to his mouth, presses his kiss to the back of it. “What do you think?” he asks, gentle with the simple honesty of the moment. “How’s the rest of your life going, bumble?”

There’s a pause, then Sherlock turns so he can see John’s face better. “I’m always surprised by how much it feels like a beginning, to be here with you. I’m always surprised by how much life we’ve got left to go.”

“Oh. Well,” John says slowly, hushed with wonder at how Sherlock can still say things like this, with how Sherlock can still take John’s breath away with how deeply and earnestly Sherlock loves him. He leans in to bump his nose against Sherlock’s, to nuzzle closer into the heat of him. “Spend the rest of your life with me.”

“I think I’m going to spend forever with you,” Sherlock answers, and kisses him.


	3. evenings

“John. John, we ought to get up. It’s gone six already.”

John groans and fusses and begrudgingly wakes up, having sunk deeper into his usual afternoon nap than he generally manages from the armchair in the sitting room. Sherlock smiles, all unruly hair and thin naked shoulders, the way he always does when John puts on any sort of grouchy performance, as if the sight of John’s brow furrowed into a frown makes him particularly affectionate.

“Cup of tea,” Sherlock says firmly, like he’s writing John a prescription for that frown, “and a sit out on the porch for a while. What do you say?”

John sighs and nods and moves, pushing himself up; his left shoulder cracks loudly, sending a jolt of pain and a spasm of nerves across his back and into his ribs. He winces and rubs at it, sitting on the edge of the bed, but it doesn’t much help. “Must’ve slept on it funny,” he says, catching Sherlock’s sharp look.

Sherlock’s frown deepens. He gets out of bed and slips into a dressing gown, not bothering with the belt, and comes to stand between John’s knees, slapping John’s hand away to feel at the muscles and tendons and bones. His hands are warm; John leans into his touch, leaning his head against the soft little paunch of his belly.  

“Tea,” Sherlock repeats, patting John’s shoulder and then cupping the back of his head, holding him against his stomach a moment before releasing him. “And a hot pad, and then I’ll have a go at massaging it a bit.”

John agrees, and lets Sherlock drape a dressing gown around him before following him into the kitchen. He sits at the table with the dog’s head in his lap, scratching her ears, while Sherlock puts the kettle on, and then the three of them head out to the porch. The garden is gilded with the leftover strains of the sunset, and the hum of the bees and the frogs and the wind is nearly as soft and soothing as Sherlock’s violin ever was.

 _Nearly_ , John thinks, remembering the line of him, silhouetted against the windows, coaxing forth the music that had been the soundtrack of their lives together. _Only nearly._

Sherlock settles John into a chair and spreads his fingers over John’s shoulders, feeling and rubbing and pressing, easing out some of the ache. He didn’t play his violin very often anymore, now that the arthritis had really started to snag and gnarl around his joints, but he did when he could. That was very much the way they had spent the last forty years: doing what they could, when they could.

They couldn’t always do it right, and they couldn’t always do it on time. But what they _did_ , when they finally did it? John thinks, looking out over the garden and tilting a cheek up for a kiss when Sherlock took the seat next to him, that it was all a little bit fantastic.

*

Once the wind gets a little too chilly, they go inside and heat up some soup. There’s more of the bread and gruyere, too, because Sherlock is pretty helpless to resist a good cheese and John is pretty helpless to resist Sherlock, even if they should be eating less dairy.

The evening wraps comfortably around them, quiet and easy, and after dinner John goes in to finish reading his book about Hemingway while Sherlock gets on the phone and paces back and forth across the sitting room, shouting first at the Met for their bungling of the Thames killer case, which even an _idiot_ could figure out all the way from _Sussex_ , for god’s sake, and then smirking down the line at Mycroft, with whom he is playing a game of long-distance Battleship and losing spectacularly, and finally, nattering on at Lestrade, who’d just got home from rehabbing after his second heart attack, full of affectionate exasperation in an attempt to hide his concern.

“Lestrade’s fine,” Sherlock says finally, when he clicks off the phone with an enormous sigh. He picks up the poker and fiddles with the fire for a few minutes instead of looking at John. “Second one, and he says he’s fine.”

“He’s only in his fifties, Sherlock,” John reminds him gently. “And he’s retiring from the force next year already, that’s almost ten years earlier than Greg did.”

“Greg hadn’t had two heart attacks by the time he retired.”

“No, he saved it all up for one really big one after it was over. Look,” John puts down his book and holds out a hand, which Sherlock takes, eager to be comforted, “Why don’t you invite the kids out for a few days? You can see for yourself how Michael’s really doing then, and I’ll give him the full stop-killing-yourself-like-your-dad-you-mad-copper speech. And it’ll do the babies some good to get out of the city, too.”

“They’re teenagers, not babies.”

“They’re teenagers, they’re definitely babies. Come on. Let’s have them out for a day or two.”

Sherlock sighs, and leans in to give John a kiss. “I’ll call him back tomorrow,” he says. “Tell him Captain Watson insists.”

“I’m old, but I’ll still kick his arse if I have to,” John agrees, and Sherlock laughs.  

*

The fire burns. Sherlock tucks a blanket around John’s legs and watches some World War II documentary on the telly, harrumphing every so often at the grainy black-and-white footage and correcting the narration, though how he got to be any kind of expert on the war John has no idea. The Hemingway book begins to drag, as if the author could stave off Hemingway’s inevitable suicide by simply taking a long time to write about it.

Finally, John loses focus, and he puts the book down. Sherlock’s gaze has gone long, looking through the telly rather than at it, so John heaves himself out of his chair and turns it off. Sherlock doesn’t seem to notice.

“Up,” John says, holding a hand out to him.

Sherlock blinks back into himself, and smiles up at John in recognition of the moment. He takes John’s hand and allows himself to be pulled up, allows the careful kiss to his mouth. Allows John the moment it takes to fiddle with the audio system in the corner, before the low strains of a soft, slow jazz fills the sitting room.

“All right?” John asks as he comes back to Sherlock, sliding one hand over the waist of his dressing gown and the other into Sherlock’s, pulling him close. Sherlock nods with a tiny smile and slips a hand around the back of John’s neck.

It’s a well-worn feature of their life, this: slow dancing in the quiet moments, taking a minute or two to remind themselves to be close, and to take comfort in it. Since the first time Sherlock had taken John into his arms in their sitting room at 221B, John had known that he never wanted Sherlock to let him go.

And Sherlock never really had.

Every shadow of their sitting room feels warm and cosy in the dying embers of the fire, because John knows what is waiting in the dark: the collection of his books, with Sherlock’s additions to make them whole, the knick-knacks and souvenirs gathered over a lifetime’s worth of cases and holidays, the ragged remnants of 221B they’d brought from London with them. The stupid clock they’d found in an antique market in Bath on their third anniversary. The drawings Sherlock had done of their hands, entwined, with their wedding rings. Things they’d gotten that John couldn’t even remember when they’d gotten them, or from where. Gifts they’d gotten from the people who have known them, and loved them, and kept them close.

It has been such a life that has brought them here, John thinks, pressing a kiss to Sherlock’s temple as they sway and shuffle in their slippers, old men that they are. It has been such an adventure, to have spent a life with Sherlock by his side.  

The jazz in the sitting room shifts, quickens and brightens, and John grins into the next dance.

*

They go to bed late, sore and achy in a way that’s so familiar they barely notice. The dog snuffles into her place at the end of the bed as they change into their pyjamas and brush their teeth, take their meds, rub lotion into their dry patches of skin.

Every story has a beginning. Some stories even have many beginnings: places where, again and again, _something happens._ This is the nature of some stories, because this, this repetition, this renewal, this second chance waiting on the doorstep for an answer to a question that had lost hope of ever being asked, is the nature of life.

Well, John thinks as he slides under the covers, this, right here, is something that is happening: it’s late, and he’s getting into bed with the love of his life. With his husband. With the only consulting detective in the world. With a hero, and a human, and a lover, and a friend. With the best and wisest man that John has ever known.

With Sherlock.

And if beginnings and middles are the thing about stories, then here is the secret: all stories must start, and all stories must happen.

But not all stories have endings.

And as John watches Sherlock across the pillows sliding toward sleep, their hands tangled together on the sheet between them, he knows that this is what Sherlock means when he talks about a forever beginning: a story that lives and goes on, in the next chapter, in the next book, in the telling and the retelling, in following through with every divergent path to see how they play out, to see how John and Sherlock are so firmly _John &Sherlock, Sherlock&John_ that in every telling and retelling and every epilogue and every afterword, they are together.

John leans in and kisses the fragile curve of Sherlock’s mouth and knows, the way he knows about stories, the way he knows about happiness, and sadness, and destruction and resurrection, the way he knows about Montague Street and Afghanistan and Baker Street and Sussex and every place and every person in between, that this is their forever.

This is their story: together, without end.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on [tumblr!](http://www.watsonshoneybee.tumblr.com)


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